Championship Memories Saturday: 2019 CMS Women's Cross Country Earns 10th Straight SCIAC Title
2019 Women's Cross Country Championship Links:
SCIAC Recap | Photo Gallery | Highlights
NCAA Regionals Recap | Photo Gallery
The Claremont-Mudd-Scripps women's cross country team headed in to the 2019 SCIAC Championships after ranking neck-and-neck in the national polls with rival Pomona-Pitzer all season long, entering the postseason three spots behind the Sagehens. On paper, the league championship was up for grabs, but CMS had a unique opportunity that it didn't want to let slip away.
After all, it isn't very often that a program can sweep an entire decade.
The Athenas finished in second place 10 years prior at the 2009 SCIAC Championships, but bounced back to win the 2010 title, beginning a streak of nine straight league championships. If CMS could take the 2019 crown, it would make it 10 SCIAC titles in a row, and give the Athenas a clean sweep of the 2010s, something that the program had never accomplished before.
"It was our tenth in a row, so it was very exciting." said Riley Harmon, who emerged as the program's top runner over the course of the 2019 season. "Going in, we knew it meant a lot to all of us."
Dulcie Jones, who came into the 2019 SCIACs after earning all-league honors her first two seasons, was keenly aware of the streak, but felt that it was important to stay focused on improving, and letting the results take care of themselves.
"It's a motivator for sure," she said of the championship streak, "but trying to continue winning SCIAC titles isn't everything. Just being able to compete with my teammates and watch both myself and my teammates improve and become stronger, more confident runners is the main thing that gets me to 6 a.m. practice."
CMS finished three points behind Pomona-Pitzer at the Master's Invitational in September, and as a result, fell behind the Sagehens in the regional and national rankings. CMS went into that race ranked sixth, with Pomona-Pitzer in 14th, but the Sagehens moved up to No. 9 afterward, while the Athenas slipped to No. 11.
That one event didn't necessarily mean a lot when it came to predicting results at the SCIACs. A month's worth of training went by in the interim, and the Master's Invitational race was only 5K, whereas the SCIAC Championship is a 6K race. But it certainly served as a reminder that the 2019 title wasn't a given, and the national rankings heading into the SCIAC Championships (Pomona-Pitzer at No. 10, CMS at No. 13) reinforced that thought.
If there was one thing that the Athenas could hang their hat on heading into the postseason, instead of where they stood in the national rankings, it was that they once again had their trademark depth. Over the nine-year championship run from 2010-2018, CMS actually had the individual champion at SCIACs only one time (Bryn McKillop in 2017). Most years, the Athenas won their championships with sheer numbers, often earning at least five of the top 10 finishers, with several more runners coming in between 10-20, making it difficult for the other league teams to score well.
That depth has value in a lot of ways. It takes the pressure off of each individual runner to know that they are flanked by several teammates who can pick them up if they have a bad day. It also makes it harder for the trailing runners from other teams to find that next gear. If you just have to catch one CMS runner 50 yards ahead, you might be able to summon the energy to chase them down, but when you see a large pack of Athena runners spread out over hundreds of yards in front of you, the task becomes a lot more disheartening.
"Having such a deep squad has always set us apart from a lot of the teams we compete against," said Jones. "Having runners spread out all the way from the front of the pack to the back is how you win meets. Knowing that I'm always surrounded by Athenas when I'm competing is so reassuring and confidence-boosting."
At the start of the year, the amount of depth the team would have wasn't necessarily certain. CMS graduated both of its top-100 runners from the 2018 NCAA Championships (Malea Martin, Natalie Marsh), and three of its top seven (with Matilda Msall). Jones and fellow junior Abby Johnson (who often ran in the front three for CMS with Martin and Marsh) were back from the top seven, as was Harmon and senior Georgia Scherer, but some other runners were going to need to step up to keep CMS at the top of the league standings.
That problem was largely solved by the sophomore class, led by Harmon, which had a big improvement over their rookie seasons. As a first-year, Harmon was the CMS No. 6 runner at SCIACs, earning second-team all-league honors, and the No. 5 runner at regionals, but became the top finisher for CMS at both events as a sophomore. Her third-place finish at SCIACs and fourth at regionals would propel her on to All-America honors at the NCAA Championships, where she came in 36th.
Harmon wasn't alone in big improvements among the Class of 2022, though. Sophie Gitlin and Brooklyn Button were not part of the seven-runner contingent that competed at NCAA events as first-years, but become consistent top-five runners for CMS all season long. Emily Clarke also had a strong improvement, finishing as one of the scorers (top five) for the Athenas during the regular season.
Another major contribution came from junior Olivia Gleason, who missed all-league honors as a sophomore by one spot, coming in 21st place at the 2018 SCIAC Championships. She was just above that cutline as a first-year, finishing 19th, but wasn't 100 percent as a sophomore, which held her back a bit. Gleason qualified for the finals in the 1500 during track and field season as a sophomore, finishing sixth with a personal best time of 4:47.64, and that led to some optimism that she was poised for a big year in cross country.
"Of course Olivia had an impressive season," said Jones, "but I'm not at all surprised! Olivia has always been a very strong runner, but has been held back by nagging injuries in the past. I knew she was going to have an awesome cross country season after her huge PR in the 1500 (at the 2019 SCIAC Track and Field Championships)."
Indeed, Gleason was regularly in the top five scorers for CMS all year, and was the second Athena to cross the line at the SCIAC Championships, with lots of company in tow.
If you were only watching the finish line, Pomona-Pitzer at first looked like they might be on their way to the championship, as the Sagehens had the top two finishers (Lila Cardillo and Helen Guo), giving them a big early advantage in team scoring. Harmon crossed the line in third with a time of 21:56.1, representing a big leap from her 14th place finish as a first-year, before the top runners from Occidental, Caltech and Redlands finished 4-5-6.
At that point, any drama over the team title would be over, as CMS fans had the beautiful site of a wave of Athenas reaching the finish to make the official announcement anticlimactic. Five straight finishers over a span of 12 seconds were all from CMS, as the Athenas took 7th through 11th place to become easily the first team to have all its scorers finish.
Gleason led the CMS five-runner pack with a time of 22:40.2, and was followed five seconds later by Johnson, who earned first-team All-SCIAC honors for the third year in a row with her 22:45.5 finish. Button came in fourth for CMS and ninth overall with a 22:79.9, and Jones earned her second straight first-team all-league honor and provided the Athenas with their fifth and final scorer to secure the title, coming in tenth in 22:49.0 (by comparison, Pomona-Pitzer's fifth finisher came in 29th).
As if that wasn't enough, the CMS parade kept coming, as Gitlin was 11th just three seconds behind Jones. First-year Isabella Brusco was 13th to capture SCIAC Newcomer of the Year honors as the top first-year finisher, while Scherer was close behind in 14th. Clarke also came in under the All-SCIAC cut-off in 18th place, as did senior Gabriella Kimmerly in 20th, giving CMS an impressive 10 of the top 20.
In fact, after Pomona-Pitzer went 1-2, a total of nine CMS runners crossed before the third Sagehen did. What appeared on paper like it might be a close battle, turned in to a relatively convincing Athena victory.
"I didn't know where everybody was behind me," said Harmon of whether she had a sense the big victory was coming while on the course. "And then I turned around after I finished, and see just tons of Athenas rolling in, and that was incredibly special to watch. I'm very proud of how everybody did; I think everybody ran just as well as they could have. It was amazing."
The season wasn't quite finished there, of course. The NCAA West Regionals were next, where CMS added another championship trophy to its crowded case with its second first-place finish in two weeks, marking the 12th year in a row that the Athenas earned a team qualification to nationals by finishing in the top two. CMS then came in 20th place at the NCAA Championships in Louisville, led by an All-American finish from Harmon, to cap off another banner year for the program. Only being allowed to have seven runners compete at the NCAA events has always been a bit of an adjustment for a team with such depth.
"We only have two postseason meets per year, Regionals and Nationals, but we treat these races very differently," said Jones. "At Regionals, the goal is to qualify for Nationals, so we try to run together and score well, but not necessarily exert ourselves as if we were trying to PR. At Nationals, there are so many other people in the race that it's really important to just focus on your own race, which is something that I've always found difficult because I'm used to having teammates by my side."
The experience of competing at the NCAA Championships is one that Jones has earned three times as a member of the Athenas.
"Championship season just feels different. It's a smaller group of teammates who travel to Nationals each year, so you really get to bond with your teammates on a different level because you're in a different part of the country with a bunch of really strong teams that you're not used to competing against, and being able to experience that newness with your teammates helps make it exciting rather than terrifying. If I had to pick one specific memory from championship season that I love, eating an entire Domino's cookie pizza with Olivia in our hotel room after our race in Louisville might take the cake."
That seems fair. After all, when you are the victors for an entire decade, the spoils should be substantial.